2 Lincolnshire Notes & Queries. 



THE NATURAL BISTORT 'DIVISIONS 

 OF LINCOLNSHIRE* 



REV. E. ADRIAN WOODRUFFE-PEACOCK, L.Th., F.L.S., F.G.S., 



Vicar of Cadney, Brigg, General and Botanical Secretary Lincolnshire Naturalists' Union, 

 and Curator of Lincolnshire County Herbarium, 



THE COUNTY. 



LINCOLNSHIRE, the second county in England in size, 

 according to the last Ordnance Survey, contains 

 1,783,769-998 square acres or 2,787-140 square miles 

 of land, fresh water, salt-marsh, fore-shore and tidal water. 

 It is about 75 miles from its extreme points north and south, 

 and 45 miles in its widest part from east to west, and lies 

 between the parallels 52 degrees and 40 minutes and 53 

 degrees 43 minutes north latitude, and 56 minutes west and 

 22 minutes east longitude from the meridian of Greenwich. 

 A little more than half of the county is upland and heath of 

 the wold and cliff ranges of hills ; the rest was formerly fen, 

 marsh, and carr, but is now most thoroughly drained by 

 natural means, artificial dykes, and steam pumps. There is 

 not an acre of true fen left in the whole county. Even 

 the bogs on the sand commons are most restricted, and only 

 found in two or three parishes in north-west Lindsey. The 

 drainage has been so thoroughly carried out that in a dry 

 season the fen-farms more distant from the outfall of the rivers 

 are badly in want of water for their stock, and to keep the cattle 

 from wandering across the natural boundaries of the district, the 

 fen-dykes, which are often quite dry. The native fauna and 

 flora of the fens have quite gone, but we have the fen-dyke 

 fauna and flora in profusion, if anyone but a native can under- 

 stand the distindtion, or appreciate the effecl: which the annual 

 cleaning out and mowing the sides of our larger and smaller 

 drains, liming and manuring have had on our flora annual, 

 biennial, or perennial and the life which it sustains. 



NATURAL HISTORY DIVISIONS. 



The plan I have adopted for these Divisions, after many 

 useless attempts to make a geological or river-basin distribution, 



* This is the greater part of an article, with alterations and additions, which 

 appeared in The Naturalist, 1895, pp. 289-301, republished by special permission. 



